The MMO Marvel’s Avengers, marketed as a big AAA service game, has seen its player count on Steam dip below 1,000 shortly after release. The reasons are terrible bugs, lack of loot, and missing content that should have long been in the game. This frustrates fans and reminds them of the downfall of Anthem.
How is Marvel’s Avengers doing? Not good. On PC, you can see from the Steam charts that the player numbers are mostly just above 1,000 gamers. At times, the number has fallen below the 1,000 mark. Additionally, there are increasingly poor reviews on Steam, where only 66 percent (as of October 9, 2020) are positive.
The declining player numbers lead to even more problems, as Marvel’s Avengers relies solely on group content in the endgame. However, with dwindling player counts, matchmaking can sometimes take half an hour or longer before a match can finally start.
Additionally, no hero may be duplicated in the match, which further complicates group formation. If five players are available but all want to play Thor, a match cannot occur.
But what is causing this decline?
bugs, content, and loot – the three major problems of Marvel’s Avengers
This is the big problem: Looking at the comments from players on Steam quickly reveals where the issues lie:
- Kilo | Jules: “The game crashes very often. Just like that. At first, you don’t care because the missions only take 5 minutes. But if you’re playing a stick with 15 stages, you just want to die. Additionally, you randomly fall through the map.”
- HiveLeader: “Despite very good hardware, I experienced intermittent FPS drops (1-10 FPS), freezes, various other crashes, and CPU usage of 100%. It’s even worse in multiplayer! There’s also rubberbanding / lag. Other bugs, like multiple characters, occur. A team from another player, 4 Hulks and 2 Iron Mans as AI.”
- Lt_Karness: “With the supposed ‘Quick Match’ feature, you wait at least 5 minutes to find someone. Then you also need luck that you can start the mission or that the power levels are not too far apart (I had matches with power differences of up to 50). If you finally make it to the mission but have bad luck, you fall through the map or enemies just disappear. At first, this is bearable, but when you’ve completed 90% of the mission, it becomes quite frustrating.”
Bugs and missing loot are probably the major annoyances in the community, ruining the fun for players. Hardly anyone puts themselves through a bugged endgame mission if they don’t even have a chance at the coveted loot. Avengers has already received a massive bug-fix patch, but it seems that it hasn’t resolved all the issues yet.
Furthermore, the developers still have not delivered promised content and have deviated from their roadmap:
- The DLC for Kate Bishop and the other Hawkeye was supposed to come shortly after launch, but after more than a month, it is still not available.
- From the planned raid in Wakanda, there is also nothing to be seen.
What does this remind us of? A similar development can be observed with the AAA loot shooter Anthem by Bioware. This game also launched with high expectations and cool ideas. But in the end, it failed miserably to meet its own goals and didn’t deliver good loot, content, or bug fixes in a timely manner. Today, the game has sunk into insignificance, although the developers are supposedly working on a comprehensive remake of Anthem.
This is what the developers say: The developers certainly do not wish for the fate of Anthem. However, despite the major complaints from the community, the team prefers to post fun facts on Twitter. Now we at least know that Cap has thrown his shield 1,384,214,730 times.
This did not go down well. But the developers have finally become a bit more concrete. In a statement on Kotaku’s page, they explain:
To our players: We fight every day to provide the best possible game for our community. We have a great community management team at Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix that daily conveys all your concerns, suggestions, and feedback to the development team. We are listening. We are implementing corrections, improvements, and additions as quickly as possible to make Marvel’s Avengers the game we all want.
In the coming weeks, we will develop a series of new contents, including: an entirely new mission type for the War Zone called Tachyon Rift, a new outpost that will serve as a starting point for new story missions in the future, and AIM’s clone lab, which will require a coordinated high-level group of four players and will offer new high-end loot. Each of these updates will also include optimizations and bug fixes to improve the overall experience.
Furthermore, we have announced two new heroes who will be coming soon: Kate Bishop in Operation: Taking AIM, and afterwards Clint Barton in the main role… the “two Hawkeyes” we mentioned in the last War Table. These new operations will pick up right where the main campaign in the core game left off, and we will advance the overarching storyline with new mysteries and villains as well as new multiplayer content.
Finally, we will continue to add new content to the game in the coming months as we address issues and overall game balance, including loot distribution and requested quality-of-life features. All of this is to improve our player experience, from the accessibility of cooperative communication tools to balancing the economy!
We are confident that PC players (as well as players on Xbox One and PlayStation 4) will return to the game when we add exciting new content to the game’s endgame and show that we remain focused on improving the game.
In a blog planned for next week, we will release further information and details about the upcoming content, and new community communication initiatives will follow soon to share even more fun and useful information with you.
Thank you for joining us on this journey to truly make the best of Marvel’s Avengers.
It seems that the developers have not given up hope and are working to save the game. Let’s hope they can turn things around and not let the game end up like Anthem.
